Rostam and Rakhsh

At a Glance

• Central figures: Rostam, the greatest pahlavan of Iran and champion of the house of Sistan; and Rakhsh, the piebald stallion who carried him through every labor and battle for the span of a lifetime.
• Setting: The plains and horse-herds of Sistan and Zabol in Iran, during the reign of the early Kayanian kings; drawn from Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh.
• The turn: The young Rostam, already enormous in frame and strength, searches for a warhorse that can bear his weight and finds that every horse in Iran buckles under his hand - until a wild, rose-bodied mare’s foal charges through the herds of Kabul and Zabol, and Rostam claims it against the warnings of its keeper.
• The outcome: Rostam and Rakhsh become inseparable, and together they ride through the Seven Labors, the wars against Turan, and every trial of Rostam’s long career - horse and rider bound as one creature until death takes them both.
• The legacy: Rakhsh became the archetype of the heroic horse in Persian tradition - his name passed into proverb, his rose-and-saffron coloring into miniature painting, and his loyalty into the definition of what a warhorse owed its rider.

Rostam had outgrown every horse in Zabol by the time he was fourteen. He had the frame of a man twice his age and the grip of something older than that - when he pressed his hand on a horse’s spine to test it, the animal’s back bent toward the ground. One after another the finest mounts of Sistan were led before him, and one after another they sagged or staggered or simply refused to stand. Zal, his father, watched this from the courtyard and said nothing. He had been raised on the Alborz by the Simurgh, and he knew what it looked like when fate had not yet delivered its instrument.

They sent word through the provinces. Every lord with a notable horse sent it to Zabol. The herds of Kabul came, and the herds of the eastern marches, and the horses of warriors who had died and left their mounts without riders. Rostam tested them all.

The Herds of Kabul

The horses came in strings of twenty and thirty, driven by handlers who boasted of bloodlines and endurance. Rostam would walk among them, and his eye was good - he could see the ones with short backs and deep chests, the ones bred for war. But the test was not in looking. The test was in pressing.

He would set his palm flat between the horse’s shoulders and lean his weight forward. Horse after horse folded. Some screamed. Some bit at him. One kicked and Rostam caught the hoof and held it, steady, until the animal quieted, then let it go. That one had spirit, he said, but no spine for what was coming.

Zal sent men deeper into the eastern country, into the lands where horses ran half-wild and were caught with lassos from galloping riders. They brought back animals that had never worn a saddle. Rostam liked these better. They had not been softened. But they still could not carry him.

A Mare’s Foal, Rose-Colored

Among the last herd driven into the yard at Zabol, there was a stallion the color of rose petals scattered over saffron - a piebald, enormous in the chest, with eyes like a creature that had decided something. His dam walked beside him, and the herdsman who had brought them said, plainly, that no one had been able to rope the young stallion. He had killed a lion on the plain. He was three years old.

Rostam saw him and stopped walking.

The stallion saw Rostam and did not move. Every other horse in the yard shifted away from the big man’s approach - shoulders angling, ears flattening. This one stood.

Rostam walked to him and set his hand on the stallion’s back. He pressed. The horse did not bend. The spine held like stone under his palm. Rostam pressed harder. The stallion turned his head and looked at him, and that was all.

Whose horse is this? Rostam asked.

The herdsman said, He belongs to no one. He is Rakhsh.

The word meant lightning - or brilliance - or the flash of something that cannot be caught. Rostam said he would take him. The herdsman named no price and asked for none. He seemed relieved.

The Brand and the Saddle

Rostam saddled Rakhsh himself. No groom touched the horse - Rakhsh permitted no one else near the girth-straps, and the first man who tried lost two fingers. Rostam buckled the saddle, cinched it, checked the bit, and mounted. Rakhsh did not rear. He did not dance sideways. He simply walked forward, and then he ran.

They rode out across the plain of Zabol, and the watchers on the wall said later that the dust cloud behind them looked like a sandstorm moving in a straight line. Rakhsh ran without tiring. He ran as though the ground were a thing beneath his notice.

Zal, who understood signs, said that the horse and the rider had found each other, and that Iran’s champion was now complete.

Rostam’s armor weighed as much as a small man. His mace, the ox-headed mace of the Sistani champions, weighed more. His bow took two ordinary soldiers to string. Rakhsh carried all of it and Rostam besides, and in the years that followed he never stumbled under the load. Not once. Not in the mountain passes of the Alborz, not in the swamps of Mazandaran, not on the frozen crossings of the Oxus in winter campaigns against Turan.

The Labors and the Long Wars

Through the Seven Labors - the lion in the wasteland, the desert without water, the dragon that came at night, the sorceress, the darkness, Akvan the div, and the final passage into the White Div’s fortress in Mazandaran - Rakhsh fought beside Rostam rather than beneath him. When the lion came at night and Rostam slept, Rakhsh stamped the lion’s skull and did not wake his rider until morning. When the dragon slithered toward the camp, Rakhsh screamed and reared and struck until Rostam woke and drew his sword. The horse did not run. Rakhsh never ran from anything.

In the wars against Afrasiab and the armies of Turan, Rakhsh carried Rostam into the thickest press of battle. Warriors who faced them said it was not like fighting a man on a horse - it was like fighting a single creature with eight limbs and two minds, and both minds wanted to kill you.

The Pit at the End

They died together. Rostam’s half-brother Shaghad, nursing an old grievance and a traitor’s patience, dug pits along a hunting trail and covered them with brush. Rakhsh smelled the danger. He balked. He planted his hooves and would not go forward, and Rostam - for the first and last time - struck him with the riding crop and forced him on.

The ground gave way. Horse and rider fell together into the pit, and the sharpened stakes at the bottom pierced them both. Rakhsh died first. Rostam lay among the stakes with his horse’s body against his side, and with the last of his strength he took his bow, set an arrow, and shot Shaghad through the tree the traitor had hidden behind - pinning him to the trunk.

Then Rostam died, and Rakhsh was already gone, and the plain above the pit was quiet. They had come into the world together in the yard at Zabol, the hand on the spine that did not bend, and they left it in the same hole in the ground, neither one surviving the other by more than the time it took to draw a bow.